Anyone know more about this? Picked it up a few years ago and had forgotten about it until I found it again last night. King Tubby mixes of dubs to Horace Andy's "Skylarking" and Jacob Miller's roots chestnut "Tired Fe Lick Weed In A Bush". I think the Andy is based on the Bunny Lee cut and the Miller on the Tommy Cowan production, don't see any link between the two other than Tubbys on the mix and possibly Channel One as recording studio.
Have these dubs appeared anywhere else before or are they from dubplate? Sky Dub is classic Tubbys; minimalist and brutal, but here the crashing thunder clap used sparingly on tunes like Allah's "Stone" is thrashed across the track in abundance. Yard is a bit less interesting and different, but pretty good.

'Sky Dub' must be one of Tubby's greatest ever mixes on a 7"! Interesting that this is a different dub to the dub side that was on the back of Horace Andy's 'Skylarking' that was repressed on Bunny Lee's Attack label not so long ago.

Hmmm, I'd love that to be true, especially if that meant the location of some of those early dub experiments were to surface. I didn't think he was still on the scene though.

From Mr Barrow's sleeve notes etc:

Tubby was born in Kingston in 1941; by 1968 he was running his own sound system, the Home Town Hi-Fi. As always, rivalry between sound systems was fierce, with operators seeking to gain a competitive edge via the exclusivity of their music. One of the biggest systems at the time was owned by Rudolph Redwood of Spanish Town, the former Jamaican capital situated some 10 miles from Kingston. His set was impossingly named Ruddy's Supreme Ruler of Sound. According to veteren deejay Dennis Alcapone, Ruddy would come to Coxsone's Studio each week and buy everything that had been recorded. He would then cut this music on acetate discs which were played on his sound system exclusively. This was an effective way of previewing music; tunes which went down well with the dance hall crowd could then be released after sufficient demand had been built up; the sound system which played exclusives would naturally attract patrons who wanted to heaer the latest music. Ruddy's began making new versions of well-known songs with engineer Byron Smith at Duke Reid's Treasure Isle Studio.
Taking his lead from the aforementioned Spanishtownian sound men, like Ruddy and Seymour Williams (aka 'Stereo'), Tubby soon established his supremacy.

One time however, Ruddy decided to have a dub cut with just the rhythm track to play at a dance. Record producer Bunny Lee recounts the story:

"Yeah . . . it was really VERSION those days - it wasn't dub yet, beca it was jus the riddim. One day a incident: Ruddys was cutting a dub, an when it start, Smithy look like im start bring on the voice and Ruddys say: no, mek it run and im take the whole backing track off it. Im say, alright, run it again, and put in the voice. Im didnít do no more like that yet. Im carry it, go Spanish Town and im play it an gi im deejay - im have a deejay name Wax I tink - and when Wax put it on, im put on the singing then say im gonna play part two. And im put on - everybody know the rhythm now, and everybody a listen to the voice, an dem don hear no voice and then everybody start sing along. So they say BRAND NEW! and then dem play it about twenty times."(Barrow 1994)